"...PERHAPS IT WAS 8,000. While most in the media uncritically repeat the results of Lancet study that asserts 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed since the end of the war, Fred Kaplan at Slate takes a meat axe to its methodology. At least two on the anti-war left, Marc Cooper and Matthew Yglesias, are colored convinced."

The point is that when we focus the analysis on effect rather than cause (ie, how many did we really kill? vs, why did they get killed?), the entire rest of the world has a pretty good reason to see us as trigger-happy cowboys with peabrains.